Jorg Haider to Geert Wilders : Far-right Normalised in Europe https://www.newsclick.in/jorg-haider-geert-wilders-far-right-normalised-europe
18/12/2023 subhash gatade A new Europe is emerging, ready to give space to ethnonationalism and exclusivist agendas.Studies tell us that “in several countries, support for the far right is growing fastest among younger voters,” The Guardian pointed out.
But the youth has not suddenly become exclusivist. There is a growing housing and healthcare crisis, and life is increasingly precarious without regular jobs. Slogans that promise to ‘make the country great again’ are bound to appeal to younger voters.
An editorial in The Hindu newspaper warns that rising ethnonationalism is a wake-up call for the establishment parties in the West. “Establishment parties should have a clear economic agenda and political vision to arrest the rising tide of far-right politics, which echoes Europe’s dangerous and not-so-distant past,”
Writing in The Wire, Aurelien Mondon, a senior lecturer at the University of Bath, notes, “We cannot pretend to stand against the far right while referring to its politics as ‘legitimate concerns’. We must stand unequivocally by and be in service of every one of the communities at the sharp end of oppression.”
This applies in South Asia, too, where parties have repeatedly demonstrated political naiveté by aligning with retrograde forces, such as under the name of “fighting corruption”. It has, ultimately, facilitated the ascent of the right to the echelons of power.
https://thewire.in/world/look-to-the-mainstream-to-explain-the-rise-of-the-far-right
in the media or academia, populism is generally used carelessly as a key defining feature. Using “populist” instead of more accurate but also stigmatising terms such as “far-right” or “racist” acts as a key legitimiser of far-right politics. It lends these parties and politicians a veneer of democratic support through the etymological link to the people and erases their deeply elitist nature – what my co-author Aaron Winter and I have termed “reactionary democracy”.
the mainstreaming process has involved platforming, hyping and legitimising far-right ideas while seemingly opposing them and denying responsibility in the process...We too often view the far right as an outsider – something separate from ourselves and distinct from our norms and mainstream. This ignores deeply entrenched structural inequalities and forms of oppression core to our societies. ..